I'm in need of advice & recommendations on how to proceed. Would be great to hear from folks who have personally implemented or are otherwise using whatever it is they're suggesting.

I've got one VM I need to keep up as long as possible. Its a production VM but I don't have a huge budget for hardware. In order to take advantage of FT/HA/vMotion, I'd like to get a small NAS to serve as storage for both ESXi servers.

Can someone recommend an [inexpensive but reliable] NAS that

is capable of creating an iSCSI target (right out the box or no special unsupported hacks!)has at least 4 baysoffers RAID 5+ (or RAID-X, RAID ADG, RAID-DP etc)is under/right around $500

Note: I don't mind if it does not come with HDD's - I've got a few SATA's.

If such a device doesn't exist, the next option is a power sipping (not guzzling) home brew NAS. Has anyone successfully built their own small NAS (think shuttle PC size - space is an issue!) that does this for under $500? If the answer is yes, I'd like to know specifics:

motherboardRAID controller (if hardware raid is not built into the motherboard; or did you go the software raid route?)OS (FreeNAS, OpenFiler, other?)any special 'gotcha's as part of the installation

Many thanks for your expertise and for taking the time to read this!

Last edited by Phylum on Thu Oct 13, 2011 4:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

Wed Oct 12, 2011 4:44 pm

Dave.Mishchenko

Site Admin

Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:13 pmPosts: 3880

Re: iSCSI NAS Suggestions or Whitebox 'NAS'

I've include a list of devices that are supported with ESXi 4.1. They might give you some ideas. They're not supported with ESXi 5 but that might just be the case that testing hasn't been done yet.

David: Thanks for all the work you do here, the VM forums among [many] other places. You're a star.

Thanks for the response - it was a nice healthy list for me to check out pricewise but I'm curious, how did you craft your query on the VMWare HCL page to find NAS/SAN devices? (Well, I assume you did this there.)

I had previously found several devices that are within my price (sub $500) range but very few are 'VMWare Certified':

So I have to ask: While I understand that going with non-VMWare certified hardware is bad enough, are there any [major] concerns about going with one of these, or any other non-VMWare certified, NAS/iSCSI devices?

Its a relatively low I/O VM but it could go up considerably over the next year or so. Hopefully by then, if this project is a success, we'll be purchasing a better solution.How can I determine thresholds for these devices, or any NAS for that matter?What are some signs I've reached/exceeded the iops threshold?

Again, many thanks.

Thu Oct 13, 2011 2:46 am

Phylum

Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 7:41 pmPosts: 8

Re: iSCSI NAS Suggestions or Whitebox 'NAS'

Other than the higher-end QNAP devices, do any other NAS' offer block-level replication between two devices? I'm not looking for an rsync solution - need real-time replication.

Sat Oct 15, 2011 8:56 am

Dave.Mishchenko

Site Admin

Joined: Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:13 pmPosts: 3880

Re: iSCSI NAS Suggestions or Whitebox 'NAS'

I had pulled the list from VMware's HCL by just filtering on what I recall as some entry level options.

As to using non-supported SAN options I wouldn't be overly concerned. Backups (for any solution) would be a far higher priority. There are lots of people using options like Openfiler, FreeNAS or Starwind. I believe you can get block replication with Openfiler.

The reason for asking about your I/O requirements was that some of the options were limited to 2 disks. It doesn't sound like you'll need significant I/O so even a system with a few disks should suffice.

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